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The idea behind Smarter Commerce, according to IBM in its press release, is to leverage key technology from acquisitions such as Unica, Coremetrics and Sterling Commerce to help partners help organizations “intelligently automate supplier and trading partner interactions, automatically turn marketplace insights into marketing and sales actions and connect online, mobile and social channels to physical stores.”

Commerce-as-a-Service adds a cloud-based “Configure, Price, Quote” offering that automatically builds bundles for customers — closing the time from making the quote to getting paid. It also enables cross-channel selling, which is a fancy way of saying it connects web storefronts to mobile devices, allowing for things such as in-store pickup and delivery — but it’s designed to integrate with IBM POWER7 Systems hardware, so it’s not much of a cloud solution.

Other new features include solutions for “Payments & Settlement” PCI-compliant solution for payment at checkout and a “Supplier Integration & Management” dashboard. Finally, IBM is promoting a new cloud-based file transfer tool for moving data into and out of customer sites.

As for Social Media Marketing, IBM said it “delivers deep analysis of natural language processing of consumer sentiment in social media,” customized to each customer. And the cloud-based Digital Marketing Optimization tool is getting enhanced with capabilities to collect, tag and syndicate customer data.

Big Blue is also launching IBM Smarter Commerce Consulting Services, which, as you may guess from the name, are professional services around deploying and managing the full range of commerce solutions for “quick start” deployments.

We’ll continue to watch IBM’s progress in the cloud closely, so keep watching TalkinCloud and The VAR Guy.